June 23, 2011

Newt Gingrich Tries to Return

“Any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood.” This direct statement from Newt Gingrich comes from his changed his position on Paul Ryan’s rejection of Medicare. First Newt was against it, but after the far-right screamed, he is for it.

Gingrich has struggled with his new campaign for Republican presidential candidate particularly after his senior staff all bailed. Newt’s reason for their disappearance is that he’s “too different” with his edgy, forward-thinking policy positions—a rebel, an outsider who challenges the mainstream. Others have suggested, however, that he doesn’t pay enough attention to the nuts-and-bolts of campaigning. The staff’s departure may be related to the appearances for the candidate’s personal film and book industries that he and his wife require staffers to coordinate. And of course, there was the two-week cruise in Greece soon after he declared himself a candidate. This from the man who complains about the Democrat “elite.”

Although Gingrich has spent lots of time lobbing questions about the not one but two $500,000 lines of credit, interest free, from Tiffany’s, the mainstream media hasn’t mentioned anything about its background. Nothing about the fact that the lobbying spending on “mining law and mine permitted-related issues” increased sharply during the time that Callista Gingrich was chief clerk of the House Agriculture Committee and Gingrich’s former chief aid works for the lobbying company employed by Tiffany’s.

Gingrich’s complaint about Obama is that he has an unfair advantage over the Republicans: “He’s going to have all the advantages of the mainstream media. He’s going to have all the advantages of left-wing billionaires like George Soros. He’s going to have all the advantages of the Hollywood crowd, and they are going to go out—and all the advantages of the unions. So they are going to try to raise a billion dollars for a very practical reason: He can’t afford to run a fair election. If he was on an equal playing field, he’d lose.” [Always someone else’s fault?]

This statement differs from what he said he would tell children who wondered what their opportunities were: “If you’re black you have to work harder, and if you’re black and poor you have to work twice as hard.”

Gingrich told one interviewer that he has written and said so much that he refuses to answer questions about what he wrote or said in the past. Fortunately, the web has a wealth of information. He doesn’t need to say anything.

The recent Republican presidential candidate debate in New Hampshire revealed some perspective on Gingrich when he compared Muslims with Nazis and Communists. Like Herman Cain, he believes all U.S. Muslim citizens should sign a loyalty oath.

Gingrich initiated his national political involvement in 1972, supporting Richard Nixon with the group Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP). And yes, that’s the way it’s known. After losing a couple of races for the House of Representatives, he became the victor in 1978. In the early 1980s he co-sponsored Endangered Species Act. His passion led him to developing the Contract with America, a ten-point plan to reshape government in decentralization of federal authority, deregulation, tax cuts, reform of social programs, increased power for states, and a balanced federal budget.

Within three years after the Contract, he was accused of unethical behavior. Of the 84 allegations charged against him while he was Speaker of the House, only one stuck: two counts “of failure to seek legal advice” and one count of “providing the committee with information which he knew or should have known was inaccurate” concerning the use of a tax-exempt college course for political purposes. He negotiated a sanctions agreement, which he immediately violated. House voted 395 to 28 to reprimand Gingrich, including a $300,000 “cost assessment” to recoup money spent on the investigation, the first time in the House’s history that the Speaker had been disciplined for ethics violations.

After the House vote against him, staffers said that he started to deteriorate. Their description of him: “He’s a sociopath, but he’s our sociopath.'” He quit in 1998 before the end of his term. “I’m willing to lead but I’m not willing to preside over people who are cannibals,” he said. His Republican colleague Tom DeLay accused Gingrich of having a flawed moral compass. Yes, that’s the same Tom DeLay who was convicted of money laundering.

Gingrich has been married three times, not unusual for people in this country but remarkable in the way that he moved from one wife to another as he touted family values and then participated in President Clinton’s impeachment. Jackie Battley, his first wife, was his high school geometry teacher. He says that he started dating her when he was 18; she says that he was 16. They married when he was 19 and she 26; the marriage lasted 18 years until he found her replacement and delivered Jackie divorce papers while she was in the hospital recovering surgery for uterine cancer. By the time he finished with her, she had to get a court order just to pay her utility bills and accept charity from her church to help support their two children.

Marianne Ginther, Jackie’s replacement, met Gingrich at a political fundraiser while her father was an Ohio mayor. They were married six months after Gingrich divorced Jackie when Marianne was 23 and Gingrich was 38. Marianne developed MS while Gingrich was having a six-year affair with Callista Bisek. When Marianne asked Gingrich how he could talk about family values and yet have an affair, he answered, “It doesn’t matter what I do. People need to hear what I have to say.” This comes from the man who claims that the “Democrats are being fundamentally irresponsible and dishonest.”

Callista, 23 years younger than Gingrich, converted him from being a Baptist to a Catholic. She is evidently highly involved in his professional matters. Gingrich does have an excuse for his marital infidelities: “Sometimes you just feel so passionate aboutAmericathat you need to go have some extramarital affairs. We’ve all been there,” he said.

In February 2011, Gingrich said that the number one job today is to create jobs. If he’s sincere, that makes him a very different Republican because the rest of them are busy taking away rights from the citizens in the form of punitive anti-choice, anti-union, just anti- laws. But objections from the Tea Party people may reverse his opinion.